Vulture Romney has never shown great signs of intelligence. Despite his claim to "bathe in data", he participated in the Carbon Crime. Anyone who actually knows how to find data and analyze information can see through that scam in 30 seconds.

Now I'm wondering if he has any IQ at all. In a feeble attempt to counter Obama's true and terse slogan "Osama is dead, GM is alive",

Romney pushed back Monday, saying "of course" he would have made the same decision.

"Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order," Romney said.

Maybe.

But we don't need hypotheticals about Carter. We have a FACT about Bush. Gandhian Hippie Traitor Bush DIDN'T GIVE THAT ORDER. He had two chances that we know of, two instances when the CIA had Osama lined up for a shot or a bomb, and Gandhian Hippie Traitor Bush decided to let the Sheikh escape. Twice.

Does Romney know that? Or does he condescendingly believe Americans don't remember it? The loyal R-bots don't remember anything, but Vulture doesn't need to convince them. They will mechanically vote R. A campaign speech is supposed to persuade the unpersuaded, not re-persuade the automatons.

Applications to the American Farm School near Thessaloniki trebled last year and are expected to double this year. Many young Greeks have a patch of land inherited from an elderly parent or grandparent and it seems that they are looking to at least provide themselves with food.

Historically, the farm school's applicants had been children of farmers from the surrounding countryside, but now more and more city kids are expressing an interest: a sign that the tables are turning for this formerly unpopular career.

Student Vangelis Evangelou agrees that prospects are looking up for the profession. "Young people thought that the future would be working in an office," he said, "but now they know they were wrong and they are going back to farming."

The Farm School, founded by a Christian missionary over 100 years ago, today boasts some of the most high tech facilities in the country. Agriculture declined when Greece joined the European Union several decades ago, but the sector grew by 32,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010 -- mostly filled by Greek nationals -- and the new breed of farmers will be more skilled and entrepreneurial than before.

Makes me wonder how and why the Farm School has kept going through the years when Greeks were more interested in EU welfare than supporting themselves....

Dr. John Henry House with his wife, Susan Adeline Beers House, founded the American Farm School in 1904, on 50 acres of barren land near Thessaloniki. The first students were boys orphaned in one of the many uprisings marking the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.

Dr. House was known as a “practical idealist,” dedicated to “educating the whole individual: the head, the hands, the heart.” Practical training in field and garden crops, vineyards and orchards, livestock and silkworm production, and in industrial skills such as carpentry, masonry and blacksmithing, equipped American Farm School graduates to succeed in farming and -- in time --to aid in the economic development of rural Greece. Modest donations of funds and equipment from a small circle of supporters in the U.S. helped the institution to survive through its early years ...

Faced with demand for higher education aimed at careers in the agriculture, food and natural resources sectors, the American Farm School established the Dimitris Perrotis College of Agricultural Studies in 1996, with a gift from Mrs. Aliki Perroti...

Still an incomplete story, but a unique example of GOOD HUMAN ACTIVITY!
What would it take to get young Americans equally interested in farming? Maybe AFS needs to open a branch here.

Still waiting for the publisher to return beta-test results on my latest submission. Trying to keep the mental decks clear for some serious debugging. This suspended-animation mode is always more stressful than actual debugging work!

Every morning I have a fresh thought that seems worthy and interesting. I start to write it here, then pause to take a closer look at the data and logic .... Nope, that doesn't hold water.

Every week I start a new digital model, then decide it's really not worth the trouble.

Outside the computer, things are going well. This year I've been steering more of my life into physical tasks that CAN'T be done on the computer, like gardening,walking and cooking. Those things bear satisfying tangible results, so maybe I shouldn't fret about the unsatisfying computerized crap.

You think you're defending Israel by ramping up another completely pointless costly deadly war against Persia.

No, you're not. You're only defending Bibi. The former head of Israel's intel operations is speaking out:

"I don't believe in either the prime minister or the defence minister. I don't believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. Believe me, I have observed them from up close ... They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off.

"They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won't have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race."

Last week the CURRENT head of Israel's military rebelled:

Diskin's remarks followed a furore over comments made on Wednesday by Israel's serving military chief, Benny Gantz, which starkly contrasted with Netanyahu's rhetoric on Iran. Gantz said he did not believe the Iranian leadership was prepared to "go the extra mile" to acquire nuclear weapons because it was "composed of very rational people" who understood the consequences.

Polls show that most Israeli citizens also have a firm grasp on reality. So our Repooflicans are not doing Israel any favors by rattling our sabers; they're just mindlessly teaming with wacked-out psychopath Netanyahu. Appropriate company for them, but wildly destructive to all three countries.

Repooflicans are constantly yammering about Individual Liberty, always telling us that Freedom is what everyone wants and needs above all. They constantly praise the Entrepreneurial Spirit Of Risk-Taking, the Noble American Adventurer.

Total ratshit.

However: when it comes to the actual desires of actual businesses, even Repooflicans manage to pick up the message occasionally.

Actual businesses want the same thing that actual people want from their government and culture. They want stability, security, and reliability. They want normalcy. You can't get normalcy from the Somalian non-government that Repooflicans clamor for; you certainly can't get it from the Kafkan super-nightmare that both "parties" have actually created and enlarged to infinity.

Normalcy requires harsh restrictions against the people and businesses who rob and kill others; loose restrictions elsewhere.

We had normalcy from Roosevelt through JFK. It began to slip with LBJ and disappeared rapidly after 1980.

Satan dba "media" is focusing today on some Chinese dissident named Ching Chong Ching Chong or whatever, who escaped from house arrest. Satan dba "media" is breathlessly following the efforts of various human "rights" organizations to do something or other about Ching Chong Ching Chong or whatever.

Meanwhile, treasonous corporations with American mailing addresses continue to profit from the labor of millions of Chinese slaves. Meanwhile, our entire Gaian Occupation Government continues to be enslaved to China by loans and debts.

Wake me up when we buy those bonds and resell them at gunpoint to treasonous corporations with American mailing addresses.

That's when I'll celebrate an escape from prison.

= = = = =

Later, after paying just a bit more attention to the story: Doesn't it seem a bit strange that the Gaian Occupation Government is protecting an anti-abortion protester in China?

Here in the glorious Land Of Individual Liberty, Let Freedom Ring, we have a specific law, a specific Exception To The First Amendment, that forbids anti-abortion protests, and we routinely put anti-abortion protesters in jail.

Hmmmm. Let me try to figure this out. Abortion is The Most Sacred Of All Rights in America, and any attempt to speak against it puts you in real jail, not just house arrest. But in China, we're willing to spend great effort to free an anti-abortion protester from house arrest.

Aha! Behind every apparent contradiction is a consistency. You just have to stand back a few steps. The consistency is here: Post-1989 American officials are sternly loyal to Motherland China. Anything that protects Chinese people is good; anything that protects American people is evil. Thus an activist who wants to prevent Chinese babies from murder is a "civil rights activist" who needs to be freed, while an activist who wants to prevent American babies from murder is a dangerous terrorist who needs to be imprisoned for life.

Finally found something halfway worth saying about the alleged "political campaign" between the two Goldman Sachs brands.

Vulture Romney is going around behind Obama, making two completely contradictory points.

(1) I'll do everything Obama does.

(2) Everything Obama does is wrong.

It's most obvious with Obama's national implementation of Romney's Massachusetts medical plan. Vulture claims that he will repeal his own plan. Well? Are you saying your own ideas are bad? In that case why should we elect a man with bad ideas?

He's doing it again with student loans. Offering to continue the existing plan, and simultaneously saying the plan is bad.

Most politicians use slogans that imply they're offering something new.

Vulture's motto is Same Deal. "Elect me! I'll keep doing all these horrible things that you hate! But when I do them you'll love them, because these horrible things will be infused with my patented unique Magick Republican Faerie Dust!"

Of course the vast majority of shit that comes out of Vulture's mouth isn't even analyzable; it's just a random selection of content-free Repooflican platitudes.

Etch-a-sketch was an obsolete metaphor. More modern: Vulture is an MP3 player with an erasable playlist. His handlers have loaded him with a selection of short quotes from Rush and Hannity, and set him to Shuffle.

= = = = =

By contrast, Obama's basic slogan is valid if incomplete. "Osama is dead and GM is alive." Those are unquestionable accomplishments, and unquestionable contrasts. Gandhian Hippie Traitor Bush had two chances to kill the Sheikh and treasonously decided not to pull the trigger; Obama had one chance to kill the Sheikh and pulled the trigger. Vulture Romney wanted to kill GM, and Obama kept it alive.

The slogan skips one big bad thing Obama did: The abovementioned Romney medical care program. It also skips one crucially important and vitally necessary thing that Obama failed to do: Permanently shut down the stock exchange and shoot all speculators.

But slogans are meant to emphasize the positive, and Obama has some real positives.

= = = = =

4/30 update: Here he goes again. Obama has already sent a special emissary to China to protest about their imprisoning an anti-abortion activist, even while we continue to prosecute anti-abortion activists here. Now Vulture complains that we should be doing something.

Romney waded into Washington's diplomatic dilemma with China by urging Barack Obama to protect the blind civil rights activist who is believed to have sought sanctuary in the US embassy.

"Our country must play a strong role in urging reform in China and supporting those fighting for the freedoms we enjoy," Romney said in a statement.

According to friends and overseas human rights groups, Chen is now under US diplomatic protection.

Well, Vulture, what would you do instead? Send a special emissary? Protect the anti-abortion activist in our embassy?

Note also the monstrous irony of the media calling Chen a "civil rights activist". If he dared to protest against The Supreme Sacrament Of Abortion here, he'd be described by the same media as a "vicious evil extreme-extreme-far-far-far-ultra-ultra-ultra-right-wingnut Nazi Fascist terrorist, who needs to be tortured and slaughtered instantly."

Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from Washington State University, believes that a method for quantifying the probability of life existing on an exoplanet will become increasingly important as more and more exoplanets are discovered.

Meanwhile, a pair of postdoctoral researchers at Penn State have been wondering if we have looked in enough places to ensure that no extraterrestrial artifacts exist in our solar system. "The vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of extraterrestrial origin would likely remain unnoticed," suggest Jacob Haqq-Misra ...

ENOUGH! Those alleged planets will never be reachable. The nearest one is many light years away, which means we couldn't even communicate with their inhabitants if they spoke English.

In other words, those planets DO NOT EXIST except as ill-considered replacements for a hated God in the satanic-imaginations of these hyphenated-idiots. Thus no further-details are needed. We don't need an index of their inhabitability, we don't need an estimate of their density. None of it.

I'm especially-disgusted that both of these hyphens are working at universities where I formerly-worked.
FACTS WILL GET YOU THROUGH TIMES OF NO THEORY BETTER THAN THEORY WILL GET YOU THROUGH TIMES OF NO FACTS.

Most low-level scams are purely cruel, abusing the decency and morality of poor people. You can strongly sympathize with the victims. Not so with this one.

Robert B. Hiatt, 57, pleaded guilty Thursday to eight felony fraud counts and a single count of intimidating a witness after he threatened to kill a whistleblower.

Hiatt presented himself to investors for a decade as a successful inventor and businessman and claimed to have inside tracks to contracts with major companies. He solicited investors using front companies that looked real. In one of his schemes, he claimed to have a contract with General Electric on a “Shriker Chip” that purportedly had the ability to harness energy from lightning strikes.

...

To convince the investors, Hiatt created letterhead, email accounts and other documents that made the companies – Highgate Computer Co. and HighPlaces LLC – look legitimate. He charged investors fees to pay fictitious bills for attorneys, bank fees, taxes and other expenses.

By using the front companies, Hiatt was able to convince investors that he had patents and sales contracts with General Electric, the U.S. General Services Administration, Sears, Clorox, Rain Bird and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, according to court records.

Court records identified 10 victims, including Bryan Teel, of Davenport, who reported losses of $1.4 million. The victims include Dr. Stephen Smith, of California, and the late Howard Michaelsen, a longtime Spokane attorney, who lost $164,896 to one of Hiatt’s schemes.

Doctors and attorneys who had a spare million to invest in a dubious scheme. No sympathy whatever. They shouldn't even get their money back.

Hiatt may be a smooth talker, but millionaires have enough resources to check things like contracts, corporate entities and patents. Doctors can afford to pay an attorney. Attorneys don't have to pay attorneys because they ARE attorneys. Even a pauper can check patents, for fuck's sake.

Now that the completely illegitimate international "court" has rendered an "official" sentence against Charles Taylor of Liberia, we can expect a lot more nuclear proliferation in the world.

Before this, nasty dictators could often be induced to abandon ship by offers of asylum in some friendly country. (In fact Taylor received such an offer, but the offer was taken back when this process started.)

Now evil dictators have no positive option. They know from observing Iraq, Libya, and North Korea that the best way to insure perpetual power is to get nukes and point them at something important.

Smart work, egregious UN monsters. You've just guaranteed more war.

The whole concept of international "law" was made up to prevent Germany from rising again after WW2. That's the only reason, and it should have gone away after accomplishing its goal. But in the modern world idiocy never goes away, it just metastasizes.

The neighbor to the north seems to love wind as much as I hate it. Every window and door on her house has two or three hanging wind-chimes. (13 separate chimes on the side facing me!) Whenever the wind reaches 20 MPH, a discordant clangor fills the area.

Last week she installed a purely ornamental windmill, about 10 feet high and made of metal and plastic. My first thought was "That ain't gonna last."

Sure enough. This morning a sudden gustfront came through:and in the middle of it, above the chimes, I heard a big CREAK! CLANK!

The silly decoration is down. Doesn't appear to have hit anything.... I was sort of hoping it would pull down a few of the chimes when it dropped.

= = = = =

Later: She put it back up, but several of its fan blades are bent. It'll be interesting to watch the dumb thing deteriorate one fall at a time. (A symbolic echo of big-time wind "power" disintegrating!)

This year, super-rainy March made most plants bud out. But the trees in that mini-woods appeared to be dead. Since I hadn't paid attention to them before, I didn't know their pattern; they might have been dead for several years and I wouldn't have noticed. I was worried.

Today, after two bright sunny 78-degree days, all of those trees are suddenly popping buds and turning their branches green.

Happy.

Okay, no doubt about it. I've become a certifiable plant freak. Completely ignorant and uninformed, but trying to learn.

EconBrowser shows a map of unemployment by county, which echoes my earlier observation on the Dust Bowl's Revenge.

Using the BLS map maker, I ran up a little animation of state unemployment. The maps start at 1978, which means there's not much background or baseline on major trends. Still, the changes within these 30 years are instructive.

Note that the Dust Bowl (more precisely the Wheat Belt) holds its own during the whole period, even after the 2008 Goldman Coup when everything else turns dark.

Note also the constant poor performance of Oregon and California, which ought to be outstanding successes by most standards. Different reasons, I suspect. Official Green Shit was destroying Oregon even before the EPA crashed the rest of the country. Calif has suffered from TOTALLY incompetent government, with the vast riches and resources of Hollywood enabling many bad administrations to fool the people and stay in power.

One of the local NPR stations fills in the overnight hours with a variety of foreign 'world radio' broadcasts.

All of these stations have a long history on shortwave, and many have dropped their SW transmissions and switched to webcasting. Nostalgia doesn't beat reality; webcasting is clearly superior for the purposes of a national broadcaster. At this point in history there's no country where radio can reach better than the web. North Korea is web-less, but its regime is so absolute that it doesn't even allow tunable radios.

Now Radio Canada is getting ready to shut down its shortwave, by orders of Harper's frugal government. The announcers are protesting on-air and trying to stir up an international response. Not gonna work. If anything, the protest is so adolescent and hippie-ish that I wouldn't be surprised if CBC shuts down the whole mess, web and all.

If you want to prove your worthiness as a representative of the nation, you have to represent the nation in some meaningful way. Sounding like a low-power drug-dealing alternative-rock station proves your unworthiness.

Real signal: the ice-cream man is making his first rounds of the year. Instead of the Official Ice Cream Man Music (Entertainer Rag), his music machine is playing La Curaracha. Rather nice arrangement, full verse and chorus.

Intended to appeal to Hispanics? Or to pot smokers? More likely the latter. But .... is it wise to associate cucarachas with ice cream?

More 1901-ish wanderings. This time from the Cyclopedia of Telephony and Telegraphy, a textbook published by ICS in 1913. (These pix are from a chapter that runs from page 404 to 416 in the PDF.)

= = = = =

First, an interesting echo of a fact that recent tech-historians have pointed out. Namely, Lee DeForest didn't understand his own invention.

This is the Audion used as a detector. Note that it's not used as a triode; the grid is effectively the cathode, so the triode isn't doing anything more than a diode.

= = = = =

Second, a 'Nothing New Under The Sun' item. Valdemar Poulsen's invention of the wire recorder is familiar, but its earlier variations take a couple of roads not retaken until much later.This is the Poulsen wire recorder in its 1913 form, under the confusing title of 'Telegraphone', which fortunately didn't stick around. Bigger and more open than later commercial versions, but basically the same.

= = = = =

Here's a variant with a steel loop instead of a wire, intended as a 'multiplexer' to transmit a single conversation to many locations. Seems like a dubious application, which became unnecessary after amplifiers using the Audion were perfected. But you can see a premonition of the reel-to-reel tape in this setup, and this device would also have served as a DAF machine or a broadcast delay loop.

Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said.

Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.

‘The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan,’ the scientists said in their paper.

They estimate that reserves of groundwater across the continent are 100 times the amount found on its surface, or 0.66 million cubic kilometres.

The "scientists" had to fuck up the announcement by putting it in the context of the monstrous criminal mass-murdering tyrannical falsehood of "global warming", which leads me to doubt everything else they say. Nevertheless, if there's any truth in this at all, it would be an unrealized resource that could lead to very different outcomes for Africa. ...

More realistically, it will lead to wealth for China. Africans have never been able to do anything. Colonial powers have always made use of Africa's resources. In this century, China is the only colonial power. If these aquifers are truly usable, China will buy up the Sahara and turn it into farmland for China. (China is already buying a lot of land in Africa, but it doesn't appear to be over these aquifers.)

Later in the piece is an even harsher indictment of African incompetence:

Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi .... said the focus of efforts to improve water supply should be on better collection and storage.

‘The fact is that there is already a tremendous amount of water available for Africa but it is rarely collected’.

A study by UNEP and the World Agroforestry Centre found there is enough water falling as rain over Africa to supply the needs of some 9 billion people.

‘Ethiopia, where just over a fifth of the population are covered by domestic water supply and an estimated 46 per cent of the population suffer hunger, has a potential rainwater harvest equivalent to the population needs of over 520 million people.’

Significantly started by mentioning that the 'Convention on Biodiversity' was passed by the same bunch of rich-ass Stalinist-Satanist tyrannical dickheads who passed Kyoto. Then interviewed the usual UN Satanists who gave the usual nonsensical counterfactual numbers. (Billions and billions and billions!!!!!! Dying every second!!!!!)

BBC then interviewed a Calif prof named Stephen Hubbell who has carefully looked at the numbers and reached FACTUAL conclusions. Namely, there's nothing special happening on the extinction front. Among the larger animals and plants that we can reliably count, there are perhaps one or two species lost per decade. This has, of course, been obvious to any non-professional who bothers to look up a few ACTUAL FUCKING FACTS.

Hubbell said that he had trouble publishing his results, but had to keep trying in the name of real science.

BBC then went back to one of the all-destroying mass-murdering UN Satanists and pressed him to name some of the thousands of species per year that he claimed were dying. He could name only one, and wasn't sure about that one.

Bravo to BBC for breaking out of fashion-shit pseudoscience in this one subject!Especially since "Biodiversity" seems destined to be the Next Big Genocidal Fashion after "Global Warming" fades.

Still running through old Google Books looking for details to use in digital models. Came across an issue of Bell's quarterly 'Journal' from 1925. Holds a variety of articles about the system's progress, finances and research.

The research section includes a couple short articles about hearing by Fletcher. This wasn't a surprise; working around speech and hearing I've often used Bell's abundant information, and Fletcher's acute observations are still a foundation for current perception research.

But these two items did surprise me:

Sure sounds like Ives was working on a television system in 1925. If Bell had proceeded along the lines implied by these two summaries, they might have reached a color system with something like an LCD screen. They got scooped in '27 by Baird at BBC, then by Zworykin at RCA. I presume they gave up the quest.

Seeing today's pix of George Zimmerman in the courtroom, it's easy to see why the prosecution and media quickly flooded the air with an older (maybe photoshopped?) picture that made Zimmerman look like the FBI's default suspect. Pudgy, square-faced, pasty. Just like Richard Jewell, like Bruce Ivins, like every other Southern redneck type falsely prosecuted by FBI.

It's also easy to see why Obama jumped in to say that Trayvon could have been his own son.

Exactly not. Judging purely by appearance, Zimmerman could have been Obama's son, and Trayvon couldn't. Without any information outside this courtroom picture, most people would think the real Zimmerman is a light-skinned black man, and most people would say he looks like a son of Barack and Michelle.

The media had to eliminate all facts and valid impressions immediately, in order to insure absolute pure raw bloody injustice.

As always.

The only question is why the defense didn't counter this. They presumably knew Zimmerman didn't look like the picture, and they also presumably had the 'smoking gun' picture of his cut and bruised head immediately after the incident. Why did they allow the media and feds to incite riot by flooding the country with the standard vicious visual lies?

A new calculation of the motions of nearby stars finds that the bizarre hypothesis of 'Dark Matter' doesn't work.

The team based their findings on the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13,000 light-years from the Sun. From this new data they calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun, in a volume four times larger than ever considered before.

"The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see - stars, dust and gas - in the region around the Sun," said team leader Christian Moni Bidin, from the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. "But this leaves no room for the extra material - dark matter - that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there."

Hmm. Nothing needed but OBSERVED AND MEASURED STUFF.

In REAL SCIENCE this shouldn't be a surprise; this should be the EXPECTED RESULT, and any other hypothesis should be considered fiction.

But our "scientific" establishment no longer practices real science. Only the most bizarre and anti-scientific hypotheses are considered to be normal and expectable. "Scientists" spend their lives whoring after the wildest and most fantastically counter-factual shit, and ruthlessly silencing every actual fact. Their only standard is status and fashion. If the counter-factual shit is high-status shit, we must spend trillions of dollars and kill millions of people to "prove" it. Just like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians, except Hilton and the Kardashians don't kill anyone.

Note the language in the headlines:

"Dark Matter" is seen as plain reality, just as "Global Warming" is seen as plain reality. Any attempt to assert OBSERVED AND MEASURED FACTS against these supposed "realities" is seen as weird and crazy and dangerous.

A dangerous lunatic named Zwick, turned wacko by the Carbon Cult, has finally come out in public and admitted that the Cult is a genocidal religion, with no connection to "science".

This is a moment of clarity. In major publications, the Cultists have pretended they're talking about "science".

Now Zwick says EXPLICITLY that HERETICAL THOUGHTS break the climate, and that heretical thoughts must be punished by burning the house of the heretic. Straight out of Bradbury.

The Cult's internal communications, and their publications in safe leftist channels, have always been viciously inquisitorial. Heretics (i.e. real scientists) have been trying to bring the internal murderous intent out into the open by hacking emails and republishing the 'safe channels', but that's not very effective. When a pure tyrannical Carbon Cultist says these things directly in a major magazine, the unconvinced will be more able to understand what's going on.

Putting it another way, Zwick has saved the FOIA types a lot of work. No need for hacking when the tyrants straightforwardly reveal their own murderous intentions.

Well, I lied. He only said the last one, but all of them are phenomena that were well-known and clear in 1968.

There is one difference: the other 1968 phenomena have all gone away, while nuns have continued to be carpet-munching radical Stalinist-Satanist civilization-hating lesbian bullbitches. So his observation is still valid, but it's 44 years behind the times.

Please, Rome, hire a Pope who didn't personally watch the crucifixion. Apostolic succession means the leader receives a chain of authority from the apostles. It doesn't mean the Pope has to be one of the apostles.

This war has been going on since before I was born. I remember looking at world maps when I was 5 years old, trying to understand why India and PawkEeStawnTheCountryFormerlyKnownAsPakistan wanted to possess this miserable and useless territory of Kashmir. I couldn't understand it because it made no sense. Still makes no sense. Kashmir has no industry, no oil, few people, very little agriculture. None of the practical reasons for a territorial dispute. It's just a big bunch of square miles. But ever since the 1947 partition, PawkEeStawnTheCountryFormerlyKnownAsPakistan and India have been semi-fighting, and on one occasion came close to throwing atom bombs at each other.

Two dogs growling over a rotten bone that would be inedible if either dog finally got it all to himself.

Now that PawkEeStawnTheCountryFormerlyKnownAsPakistan has shown it's possible to pull out of a nonsensical war, will we learn by example from our Valued Friend And Ally?

Nope. We're fucking EXCEPTIONAL. We learn only the opposite. When experience tells us to stop, we drive faster. When experience tells us to turn on the windshield wipers, we throw mud on the glass.

NOAA wanted to set up a new Gaian Crystal Cathedral called National Climate Service. This official Court Of Prophetic Fulfillment would officially attribute every single bad event to Evil Carbon, and would predict that everything bad in the future will also be caused by Evil Carbon.

Congress actually had the guts to eliminate the budget item!

Needless to say, Bloomberg and the other tyranny-loving money-grabbing all-consuming mass-slaughtering genocidal Satanists of Wall Street are unhappy about this small omission.

I'm happy! Congress gets something right once a year, usually by accident; this time it appears to be halfway intentional!

= = = = =

Later: Why in the hell doesn't Congress tell us about its occasional good deeds? I didn't hear about this from any Repooflican politician, only from the Satanists who dislike it. Congress might gain a few points of respect if it would publicize these rare moments of common sense, these brief lucid intervals when it does its fucking job.

And I'm constantly amazed by the complete incomprehension of what Breivik is doing. From the Guardian's Helen Pidd:

Some on Twitter this morning have queried an assertion I made in my main story on Tuesday in which I wrote that Breivik never "fully articulated" the threat on which he was so fixated.....But what made Tuesday such an arduous day in court was not just the hateful nature of his testimony, but the fact that so much of it was completely contradictory.

Not only does Breivik claim that he had copied al-Qaida's strategies in order to protect the west from the Islamist threat, but he also insisted that his goal (in the short to medium term) was to make pariahs of Europe's nationalists – the very people with whom you might expect him to feel kinship.

"I thought I had to provoke a witchhunt of modern moderately conservative nationalists," he said. ...The effect of this "witchhunt", said Breivik, would be to increase "censorship" of moderately nationalist views, which would "increase polarisation". The effect of this, he said, would eventually lead to "more radicalisation as more will lose hope and lose faith in democracy". Ultimately, he said, these new radicals would join the war he has started to protect the "indigenous people" of Norway and western Europe.

Nothing contradictory at all. Standard tactic of any activist group that wants to succeed. Invented by Lenin, perfected by the black activists and Friedanites of the '60s, and formalized by Alinsky.

Sure enough, he got exactly what he wanted. The alleged 'moderate conservatives' have been running a hardline jihad against the real nationalists.

The one part of Breivik's mindset that strikes me as unusual (but not contradictory) is this: His agenda is closer to the standard Western government than to the standard Nationalist type. He strongly favors Israel and hates Muslims. Same as any Western government, same as most Western media. The difference is that Breivik treats the Muslim-hatred seriously and consistently, while the Western gov'ts play all sorts of idiotic games with it. After every supposed attack by supposed Muslims they tell us to watch 'suspicious behaviors', implying that we should beware of Muslims; but when anyone actually reports suspicious behavior by an actual Muslim, the authorities come down HARD on the complainant.

Makes me wonder: Is this another part of the Alinskian tactic? Intentionally forcing the authorities into cognitive dissonance by applying strict logic to their idiocy? They're certainly showing all the signs of CD.

I'm still constantly amazed and disgusted by the extent of ignorance about America's "election" process. On any talk show, most experts and most callers on both sides operate from the idiotic assumption that every vote matters.

This was never true. From the start most states have given all the electors to the candidate who won in that state. At first the choosing was done by the state legislature; gradually it shifted over to direct votes. The source of the choice doesn't matter, only the method of proportioning the electors. All-or-nothing, which has been the default most of the time, guarantees that most states will be 'safe' for one party.

So the usual babble about the Electoral College compensating for large-state advantage is intentional propaganda. Size is irrelevant. Only 'safeness' versus 'swinginess' matters. As political operatives have grown ever more expert at locating and manipulating voters, the focus on swing states, swing districts, and swing precincts, has grown tighter and stricter.

This means that you DO NOT EXIST unless you live in a swing precinct. Your interests, no matter how widespread, DO NOT EXIST unless they can serve as a focus-grouped wedge for TV advertising in a swing precinct.

Medicare Part D says it all. A trillion dollars wasted by everyone to buy the votes of 700 rich widows in West Palm Beach. Would have been vastly cheaper to bribe them directly.

Polistra lionizes Henry Ford for his eminently sane approach to industry and labor.

Turns out, though, Henry didn't originate the trend. Around 1901 there was a lively movement within industry and ... AMAZINGLY ... also among academic economists!!!! ... to restore the human element to work and business.

I bumped into this accidentally while looking for some detailed pictures of 1901-ish electrical instruments as sources for digital models. Looking for Weston galvanometers, ran across 'Social Economics of the Weston Instrument Co.' This little 1905 pamphlet described the plant and working conditions of the Weston Co, toward this purpose:

Caught my attention. Looked further, and found quite a few similar industrial statements and a whole branch of economics that bloomed around 1900, then apparently died.

Later, Gunton shows that Smith's "invisible hand" is fully illogical, and begins to lay the foundation for an employer's regard for his workers:

Henry's assembly line workers came from the poorest and least skilled segments of the population, and his Sociology Department trained the workers and their wives in those basic notions of hygiene. Now, of course, Die-Versity prohibits us from assuming that poor people need training, and Capitalism prohibits us from spending any money to improve their lot. So the poor have returned to the condition described by Gunton. The only difference is that TV and McDonalds make it much easier to avoid fresh air, sunlight, exercise and wholesome food.

= = = = =

Social Economics marked the end of Gilded Age v 1.0. The application of Social Economics by Ford, E.W. Marland, and many others led to America's true Golden Age, the period when an ordinary man could support an ordinary family in a civilized way, the period when both employers and workers were trying to advance the interests of the working man in order to maintain prosperity and stability for all.

After 1980 we abandoned Gunton and Ford, and suicidally returned to the Gilded Age principles that had so dramatically failed before. Now a few lonely economists (eg John Médaille, Yves Smith) are attempting to rebuild a more humane view of labor and capital. Maybe they don't need to start over from scratch.......

Nice story in today's Spokane paper about the fading of cursive, and some attempts to bring it back.

One comment from a teacher at a Catholic Montessori school struck me as perfectly beautiful. It's just my sort of idea and I'm embarrassed that I'd never thought of it!! (I discussed cursive last year but didn't make this wonderful connection.)

Saint Dominic School, Immaculate Conception Academy and most Montessori schools use what’s called a cursive-first philosophy.

“Cursive writing better corresponds to the nature of the language,” [Immaculate Conception teacher] Temple said. “It shows children immediately that words are unities, not simply groups of disconnected letters; it shows that sounds combine to form precise and definite words, which in turn represent ideas.”

YES.

We don't form speech from separate letters. Each word is a continuous flow, and the things we call 'consonants' are not distinguishable at the moment when they happen. Instead, our ears distinguish between the various 'consonants' by the shaping of frequencies in neighboring vowels. (Discussed earlier here.)

= = = = =

A quick demonstration. I spoke the meaningless word 'abagada' with as much consistency and flatness as I could muster. The waveform is below, and the spectrogram above. (Click here for the awful sound.)

Spectrograms show the frequency patterns vertically; where the red is denser, that frequency was emphasized more by the shaping of the mouth at that moment. Focus especially on the range between 4k to 6k cycles per second. Our ears actually sense the difference between b,g,d by reading the frequencies in this range as they slide up and down, appear and disappear. Note how each shape is present both before and after the pause that marks the 'consonant'. Our ears get very little information from the actual pauses, except that we may distinguish voiced (b,g,d) from voiceless (p,k,t) by the length of the pause.

There's never a dull moment; the tongue and lips are always moving, so the frequency emphasis is always changing, always transitioning smoothly from one shape to the next.

All four vowels are written as a, but in fact each one is quite different, carrying the base formant pattern for 'ah' along with the constantly changing transitions between the momentary consonants.

In cursive the same thing happens. The transitions carry a remnant from the previous letter, and smoothly turn toward the shape of the next letter. Your hands and eyes get a chance to remember the previous and anticipate the next; the whole word is FELT as a whole when you write it and SEEN as a whole when you read it.

A "study" reports that for some mysterious unknowable inscrutable incomprehensible reason,

Temporary workers who come and go as they please drive down the wages of permanent staff by as much as 5%.

Not only do temps spoil wage rates, they make you work harder, too, the report said. Companies that use temps are generally more cut-throat and cost-conscious than those who do not – generating more profit for the bosses but making employees work harder as a result, researchers said.

I am shockedshockedshockedshockedshockedshockedshockedshocked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nay! Nay! This cannot be true! We all know that companies hire temps to raise the pay and improve the working conditions of everyone! Companies outsource to China to raise the pay and improve the working conditions of everyone! Creative destruction benefits everyone! Free trade benefits everyone! Illegal immigrants benefit everyone! These facts are indisputable... or at least they're never disputed by people who want to remain alive!

I noted recently that Betty Friedan's peculiar brand of sadistic grotesque civilization-destroying tyranny seemed to have moved down a notch on our Toxic Totem Pole Of Suicidal Status, replaced by the alternate civilization-destroying tyranny of We All Hoodie Now.

Decisive proof yesterday in the little flap about Misteromney's spousal unit. Some insane Jew Friedanite knocked Romney's wife for not working, and a hard response came from all sides.

Response from Repooflicans was tribal and meaningless, defending Romney only because It's His Turn. Repooflicans usually take Friedan's side on this issue because vulture capitalists want absolutely everyone working 24 hours a day, earning zero wages, borrowing at infinite interest, and consuming Chinese-made shit. There has always been a quiet but firm alliance between the all-consuming capitalist vultures and the all-consuming Friedanites on the question of female employment. The Friedanites want women working for Stalinist reasons; the vultures for zero labor costs. And so between the two of them they lick the country clean.

Much more meaningful response from Obama himself, and Obama's spousal unit.

When a Dem president AND his wife speak out firmly against a Friedanite on a 'core issue' of Lesbo-Stalinism, you know the game's over.

Moral of the story: If you want relative peace and sanity, follow the example of white liberals. Live in a cold place with near-zero black population, a place Al Sharpton doesn't find interesting.

= = = = =

Later thought: Actually the riot/don't riot distinction above is obsolete.

In the last 20 years (specifically since 1992) nearly all mass killings with a political flavor have been done by whites or Orientals. School massacres, vigilante action, Afghan civilians killed by soldiers. Since 1992 black violence has been widespread but 'ordinary', not riotous or political.

Authorities should be reading an error-correction signal from this switchover.

Signal: Whites and Orientals are sensing accurately that the government, culture and media are biased against them. Blacks are sensing accurately that the government, culture and media are serving their ends quite nicely.

Instead of trying to pull out of this skid, the authorities are continually increasing their habitual bias in favor of blacks. Positive (bad) feedback as always.

On Point featured a lively history of Mexican food in the USA, with some surprises about its early popularity. Callers narrated their first experience with Mexican food, which pinged me into a memory that was nearly lost.....

I'm pretty sure my mother served canned chili and canned tamales, but she was a terrible cook and everything was the same tasteless mush with different names.

Around 1960 we went out several times to a fairly genuine Mexican restaurant in a little stucco building at Pottawatomie and Manhattan Avenue, next to the Hunter's Island bridge. I'd bet the place had been a just-outside-city-limits roadhouse in earlier times. The interior was dark and grimy, but the food was an absolute epiphany; especially the chili, which was completely unlike anything we had at home. The gustatory equivalent of suddenly seeing in sharp color after a life of blurry B&W, or hearing Schütz after a life of Lawrence Welk.

When I started cooking for myself in the '70s I quickly figured out how to make chili-like concoctions.

Through the '90s and '00s (pretty much my TV-enslaved Republican period) I was trying to eat in a more carnivorous style. Now that I've finally come back to the older pox-on-both mode in thought and the older meatless mode in food, I've also returned to the sensations of that Pottawatomie chili.

They say addiction is a form of nostalgia: you're always trying to recapture that first puff, that first beer, that first love.

By that standard this is undoubtedly nostalgia but it's not addiction. Every spoonful is just as satisfying as the original.

= = = = =

Artistic note: Logically speaking Mr Sun is the one cartoon character, among all conceivable characters, who doesn't need and can't use a sombrero! (How can it protect him from the sun?) But I like the way it looks, so art overrules logic.
= = = = =
Later: A better map here.

This morning is one of the few times I almost want a camera, though I'm not sure a camera would catch the effect.

Every blade of grass bears a single drop of dew on its tip. The sun is just popping above the housetops. From one angle the grass looks like a field of diamonds. From other angles each drop prisms the sun into a unique and bright color.

This doesn't capture the beauty either, but at least it's a visual image in case the verbal was unclear. Polistra seems to like it.

Both GWPF and WUWT are excitedly noting an open letter from 26 FORMER employees of NASA, complaining about NASA's constant advocacy of mass-murdering Gaian pseudoscience. Many of the signers are scientists.

GWPF headlines "Climate Rebellion Rocks NASA."

Nope. If those same 26 were CURRENT employees, then we could truly say "Hansen, you have a problem."

But they're FORMER employees, who do not exist.

Unless your hand is DIRECTLY on the money valve RIGHT NOW, you do not exist.

Blessedly serious changes are happening in Canada now because their government has directly shut off the money valve.

Satan dba "American media" is crowing this morning about March setting an all-time record in "all of the lower 48." One report says that only the state of Washington is cooler than normal. This supposedly proves that we MUST DESTROY OUR ECONOMY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!! WE MUST LET CHINA HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING NOW!!!!!!!!!!!! NATIONAL SUICIDE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

East of the Appalachians, where the People Who Count live, it's certainly an all-time month record and looks like part of a 3-year trend.

In the middle it was unusually warm but doesn't look like a trend.

West of the Rockies, nothing. Continues a pattern of cooling and de-extreming.

Well, we know that Satan dba "American Media" only knows NY and Florida, for obvious reasons... but at least they could look up Lower 48 in a dictionary. The term does not mean New York and Florida.

Something unusual is happening in the last few years, but it's not happening everywhere, and it's bringing different patterns to different places. The unusual phenomenon is not heat. It's a tendency for pressure zones to stick in place much longer than usual. Far as I can tell, nobody is even trying to find a cause for this They're all too busy blaming Evil Carbon for a generalized heating, which isn't happening.

The good part: Satanic "education" doesn't work very well. As I noted in detail a few years ago, America and Russia have roughly the same degree of disbelief in Darwin's lies. Both places have been tortured by all-Darwin "education" for almost a century, yet both places remain unconverted, with only a quarter of the people believing the lies.

Most people have a pretty good sense of right and wrong. Smarty-pants kids are especially able to locate the truth outside of school, verifying that everything they hear inside the school is either wrong or distorted.

I was able to do that back in the '50s and '60s because I liked to read and browse libraries. In the few subjects I found interesting, I had a pretty good feel for the range of real knowledge; in each of those areas I knew that the school texts were either trivial or false. Since it was highly unlikely that the state curriculum was designed to annoy me personally by lying about the few things I found interesting while presenting valid info about everything else, I could safely assume that the whole mess was false or dubious.

Now the Web makes it vastly easier to find truth, or at least to acquire a broader perspective on the arguments within each discipline.

= = = = =

The bad part: Jesus, such a monstrous waste of time, talent, money and lives. Kids spend most of their days hearing toxic shit. Some of them absorb the shit and become carriers of the toxin, while others decide to distrust absolutely everything they hear. Hell of a way to run a society.

= = = = =

The most tragic waste is much deeper than the truth value of the facts. Every hour spent on teaching ANY facts is tragic. Kids don't need facts, they need skills. School should teach you how to make things, which includes making your own facts from direct observation of the world. Facts are sometimes useful as practice material for abstract skills such as logic or writing ... but those facts are disposable, like the dissected frogs, or wood lathed into useless lamps, or burned pies, or three-sleeved blouses, or melted circuit boards, left over from learning concrete skills. Skill-training wastes material, but fact-training wastes human lives.

One of the speakers, discussing proliferation, said "North Korea sells its missiles to the highest bidder."

Well? So let's be the highest bidder. Operate through several convincing Arab or Soviet-bloc middlemen. Buy everything that comes on the market; take it apart to examine the technology; then destroy it.

Zero problems. Would require some money, but would cost a whole fucking lot less than a war.

GCHQ, the Government's listening post, have grown increasingly concerned that modern internet technology has left them unable to intercept calls which use new technology instead of traditional phone systems.

Systems known as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, route telephone calls over the world wide web. Senior intelligence sources with detail knowledge of the problem said GCHQ had seen their access to telephone intercept information "eroded" by the use of the internet telephone services.

In the first place, spies never complain publicly that they are unable to read a certain type of communication. That simply tells the enemy which type to use.

Second, you can be 100% certain that GCHQ has access to all the net nodes in Britain. A call or message that doesn't pass through Britain will get missed, but that's not the complaint.

And if they really can't get access to all the calls, maybe they should hire some of the technical people from Murdoch's newspapers.

GCHQ has a long reputation for extreme cleverness in technology, spycraft and cryptology. They were at the very top of the spy game in WW2 and Cold War years.

If they're still smart, this complaint would be an attempt to steer "terrorists" toward Skype because GCHQ found that easier to monitor.

If they've declined to the same level of suicidal stupidity as the rest of the Western world, then this is just more evidence of raw incompetence.

I was pondering my fairly recent switch to daily exercise and basically vegie food after a couple decades of (relatively) carnivorous diet and (relatively) sedentary habits.

The switch wasn't a Grand Plan or a Resolution. Rather, it was just one thing leading to another. Tree removal ---> opening up to the outside ---> moving around more ---> thinking more about plants and food.

The transition is visible in the pictures I make for this blog: since the tree-cutting, pix have grown much more outdoorsy and plant-y than before.

It's never about "rights" or "morality" or "discrimination" or any of that atrocious tyrannical evil monstershit. Those are just weapons, avatars in the symbolic battle. Down deep it's always about status. Coolness. Hipness. Richness. Fame. Kardashianity.

This little fight shows it cleanly because the dispute itself involves nothing more than raw COOLNESS. Only indirectly about power or money; directly about status.

The new flare up was prompted by comments from Karen Crouse, widely respected golf reporter for the New York Times. She has written forcefully about the shame that hangs over the Masters tournament by dint of its association with Augusta, the Georgia club that over its 80-year history has never agreed to take any women members.

But it seems that in the New York Times's Manhattan offices, to write forcefully about the subject is one thing, to speak publicly about how you would boycott the event quite another.

On Thursday, golf.com published an interview with Crouse in which she said: "If it were left to me, which it seldom is in the power structure of writer versus editor, I'd probably not come cover this event again until there is a woman member. More and more, the lack of a woman member is just a blue elephant in the room."

When Associated Press contacted the New York Times's sports editor, Joe Sexton, for his reaction, he slapped Crouse down, saying her comments were "completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to."

Golf is absolutely nothing but status. It's not a real sport or real exercise, it's pure conspicuous consumption. Along with Havana cigars and Gulfstream jets, golf is a quantitative statement that you're able to burn billions of dollars for no possible purpose.

Crouse made the mistake of believing that his or her particular status point was still the most important. Nope. Friedanism is no longer at the top of Satan's official totem pole. It has been replaced by hoodies and Trayvon.

If a private golf club banned a member for wearing a hoodie, the NYTimes wouldn't have to jump into the fray at all; FBI would send an elite assassination team to take out all members of the club and all members of their families, yea unto the seventh times seventh times seventh times seventh generation, bomb the club's "compound" down to the liquid mantle of the earth, and wipe out all records and memories of the existence of the organization. FBI doesn't miss a detail when you commit heresy against this week's top Satan-status.

= = = = =

Later: Another nice indication that hoodie be at the top of the pole now. Derbyshire spoke the absolute plain truth about hoodie at Takimag. Now Judas Review Online has issued a strict and official denial and abjuration of truth, vigorously stroking Satan's erect totem pole as always. Not surprising for JRO; they refuse truth every time it's offered. Still, rather neatly apposite on Good Friday.

At least 100 people have now been sickened by an outbreak of salmonella possibly linked to sushi, government health officials said Friday. Nearly a quarter of them are from New York...

Sushi is an insult to all of humanity.

We've been working on this business of cooking for 200,000 years now. In the last 2000 we've been perfecting it, determining which foods must be cooked thoroughly, which are better when cooked, which are safe to eat raw. We've figured out dozens of different ways to cook food, and an infinity of variations and recipes. Along the way untold thousands, maybe millions, have died in the process of experimentation.

Now these fools have the gall to insult the memory of those noble sacrifices by eating raw fish just because it's cool and fashionable.

I don't expect intelligence from New Yorkers, but the other 3/4 of these cool people should have known better. I hope they get even cooler, as in sushi temperature. Only way to train them.

I couldn't resist checking out the 1940 census. Actually the most interesting part is the detailed maps of towns that I know. Seeing which additions were built at that time, which additions were platted but never built, where the streetcars ran, and how the roads have changed.

Tried to locate both sets of grandparents. One was easy, the other is a complete fail. I knew ... or thought I knew ... where both were living in 1940. Both were in small towns. Father's side in Okla, mother's side in Mich.

Father's father lived on a small semi-farm close to town, and a scan through the pages for that town found him quickly. Didn't expect any surprises, and didn't find any. The only new info was his income: school janitor, $1100 per year. That's about $18k in today's Bernanke counterfeit, which doesn't seem impressive. But inflation doesn't tell the whole story. In a very small town where you can grow your own crops and chickens, $1100 was pretty good. Well above the national median of $956, and the 'proprietors' of various 'retail establishments' in town had similar or lower incomes. Verifies the assumption I'd already made, that Grandpa was wise and responsible to grab and keep a gummint job. Only oil company employees and teachers earned much more than average. (The notion that teachers have always been underpaid is wildly untrue.)

Mother's father (who I barely knew) wasn't listed anywhere in the town where he supposedly lived. I know two approximate addresses from that era, and I'd seen both houses when we visited there in the 1960s. I've even found one of them on Google Street View and pinned down the address. The subdivision containing that house is present on the census map, but the census zone written on the map in that area isn't listed as a valid enumeration zone, and the written lists don't include the street.

Well, that side of the family is already packed with myths and mysteries. Many dates and names have already turned out to be wrong. Maybe this is yet another mystery. I'll look again later, to see if the census fills in the missing zone.

= = = = =

August 2012: Checked again, through one of the newer non-gov't 1940 census sites. This listing includes the missing suburban enumeration zone, but it turns out that mother's father hadn't yet moved to the suburbs. Found him in the earlier in-city address after all. Maybe I simply overlooked it before, or maybe that part of town was also missing from the gov't site.

His job was listed as Engineer, and his income was $5000. That's about $80K now by strict inflation, but probably more like $150K in terms of relative rank. (Median * 5). So my mother's stories of a comparatively wealthy household, with a live-in maid, were probably accurate.

= = = = =

Both grandfathers were barely educated, quitting school around 6th grade. Both ended up earning decent incomes in the Depression. Mother's father, who was trained as a steam engineer in the Navy, did much better monetarily ... but it didn't give him a happy life. Around that time he started drinking, and things fell apart quickly.

Superimposing England (faint pink) on Iowa (dark blue) you can see that the overall range is very similar. In the last 20 years Iowa has a couple of wet peaks that go well beyond anything England ever gets, but the dry years appear to be the same range and the same quantity.

Supposedly the last two years are the "severe drought". England received about 700 mm in each of those years, which is about 27 inches in real units. In ANY American state, even the wet Eastern ones, you'd be slapped silly for calling 27 fucking inches a drought!

If 27 inches counted as a drought, then Iowa should have been in "severe drought" several times recently. Has it?

Iowa is long overdue for a major drought, and there are signs it could happen this year.

Elwynn Taylor, an Iowa State University Extension climatologist, said the state averages an extended dry spell every 19 years. Tree rings from the past eight centuries prove it, he said.

Nope.

Admittedly England has lots more people than Iowa, but England also has one huge advantage over Iowa. England has oceans. A few miles from London, essentially infinite supplies of salt water, just waiting to be desalinated.

Not a drought. Just a complete lack of engineering, plus privatized water systems. America escaped that particular disaster; for some reason we left water systems under municipal control, where they are still competent.

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

The study shows that “the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,” said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut’s director of wildlife management. “There is no doom and gloom.”

Mr. Gissing added that the government isn’t dismissing concerns about climate change, but he said Nunavut wants to base bear-management practices on current information “and not predictions about what might happen.”

Gissing sounds like a man who enjoys his new freedom to speak the truth. Previous national gov'ts in Canada censored the truth rigorously, but the new Harper administration has firmly abandoned lies and tyranny.

The semi-humorous 'Feedback' column in the latest New Superstitionist contains a fine example of how old technology can be totally forgotten and misunderstood.

FINALLY, Allan Reese sends his application for membership of the Society for the Promotion of Numerate Proofreading (6 August 2011). He supports it with a story from London's Daily Telegraph on the 50th anniversary of the LEO I, the general-purpose business computer developed by J. Lyons & Co, which owned tea shops throughout the UK in the 1950s.

A factoid box in the article proclaims that the clock speed of the LEO was 0.5 MHz and that of an iPhone 4S model is 800 MHz. It goes on to explain that "the iPhone is faster by a factor of 16,000".

It is possible, though, that it is not just this number that is too high. Feedback and Allan both consider a speed of 0.5 MHz rather large for a system built with thermionic valves. We find the figure repeated dozens of times in very similar phrasing in numerous internet sites, such as the Wikipedia entry for LEO I. Could it be that a mistyped number has proliferated wildly thanks to LEO's successors?

Okay, I see the basic arithmetic error. Should be a factor of 1600. Fine.

But why in hell would you think 500 kilocycles is "rather large for a system using valves"?

500 KC was already super-easy for tubes in the 1920's. By the '50s, commonly available tubes were routinely generating precise waveforms at 800 megacycles, the same clock freq as the new Chinese-slave-built Apple iWhatevers.

Specifically, 800 MC was within the bandwidth of UHF TV channel 69, which was not even the top channel. Channel 83 was 896 MC. Many American homes had UHF converters or UHF televisions in the mid-1950s.

So: If the LEO computer kept its clock speed down to 500 KC, it most certainly wasn't because of frequency limitations of tubes. More likely because of near-zero memory to store results. Beyond a certain speed the output will be too fast to read or print.

The limitation of tubes was not speed but complexity. A super-simple calculator requires at least two dozen switching elements, and serious computers require millions of switching elements. Two dozen full-sized tubes is about the limit for a device you can keep in a house or office; it could be stretched to two hundred with miniature 'hearing-aid' tubes. Beyond that you're getting into rooms full of racks, requiring vast air conditioners. A million tubes would be completely impossible.

Polistra is showing a typical triode from the '30s, which could handle about 50 MC, the clock speed of a high-end PC in 1990.

I have some attachment to the question, since I lived in the Ridpath for a month when I first moved here in 1990. At that time it was fraying around the edges, but it was still a pleasant place and a full-service hotel. Restaurants, laundry, maids, barber, magazine shop... all in one place. Downtown skywalks took you directly to banks and stores. If you didn't require lots of privacy, you could live a complete life without ever stepping outside!

Since then the Ridpath has gone downhill precipitously. By 2008 it had failed, and in true 2008 form, it was securitized to an uncoordinated set of 20 different owners. Not a condominium or shared partnership, just 20 feuding companies and people. It's not clear what any of these owners wanted to do with 1/20 of a vacant hotel, and they haven't even agreed to keep it safe or keep the doors locked against transients. Presumably each party hopes to hold out till the others give up, in order to get a big payoff from whatever finally happens.

Until now the city allowed that situation to fester. Now they've finally grown a pair, and they're taking physical steps to show that there won't be a payoff. Slapped a "Do not occupy" order on the whole place, and installed concrete barriers on the parking garage, which was the only functional business.

= = = = =

Later thought: This is yet another case when Spokane mayors prove my father's rule about politics: "If you want Democrat policies, vote Republican. If you want Republican actions, vote Democrat." Repooflican Mayor Condon, elected last November, has proved the rule three times now. First he enforced Die-Versity Privilege in a case involving a cop who correctly restrained a crazy dude; Second, he enforced Disability "Rights" in a case involving a drunk cop who was trying to claim alcoholism as a "disease". (Amazingly the city council forced Condon to back down on that one.) This time Condon's Democrat action fits one of the few good Dem tendencies. He's keeping a short leash on rapacious property owners, while the previous supposedly Dem mayor had let the owners run wild.

Noted on this morning's random walk..... a new sign on the screen door of a nice 1960-ish house. Not the usual store-bought sign; this was made with plastic marquee letters carefully glued to the door.

That's definitely a sigma. Can't be a lazy M or anything else. And the careful centering indicates that there aren't any missing letters.

Well, what do they mean? Is there a Sig Delt Something-or-other fraternity that has been annoying people? Unlikely. Spokane isn't a college town, and this neighborhood isn't near the only university that might have frats.

A mathy pun? "Totally no solicitors!" "Know some solicitors?" "I want different solicitors!" "No sequences of solicitors! One at a time, please!" Again, this isn't a college town, so nobody would bother to put math humor on their door.

Later correction 4/14: This morning I snuck up and took a closer look. Dammit, it's not a sigma after all. It's a vertical emoticon assembled from the punctuation parts of the marquee letters. Presumably means "Beware of Grumpy Old Farts! We're watching you!"

In the previous entry I showed the March rainfall here, totalling 4.5 inches. I was thinking we were lucky that La Nina started late this year. The same amount of precip in December would have made about 60 inches of snow, and would have collapsed lots of roofs.

Turns out the liquid water has also collapsed one flat roof! An auto-repair business, constructed in the '80s when the builders really should have known better. Flat roofs in snow country are simply a terrible idea.

Presumably the owners failed to keep the drainage pipes clear, so that the water accumulated over a month.

There haven't been a lot of jumbo winners, so the sample is too small to draw any real conclusions. Still, you have to ask why none of them have even tried to make a big splash.

There are lots of deeply significant or ego-boosting things you could do with $100 million or $50 million. You could permanently fund an advocacy group or think-tank. You could buy a TV station or a news website or a small college, and run it to serve your own purposes.

Or consider the SuperPACs in this year's election. Each one exerts a huge influence with just a few million. When Comrade Bill Maher tossed ONE million to Obama's PAC, it made a big splash.

Surveys show most winners simply fritter the money away in a few years. Where's the ego value in that?

Satan dba "American Media" is setting up a new civil-rights movement based on total falsehoods, devoted to killing George Zimmerman. (And by extension, all whites.) Nobody's even stopping to ask whether such a movement is needed, or whether the hoodie deserved what he got; the only question is the form and leaders of the movement.

I found myself thinking of a stronger question: Who among America's black leaders will speak for common sense and law? Where's Obama? Where's the Nixon-to-China thingamabob?

Well, the answer to that is easy. Obama knows his black constituents have figured out he's identical to Romney, just another Goldman slave. This new "movement" will be a perfectly timed distraction for his base, and for the idiot white commies who think we all hoodies now.

Will white working-class voters form a counter-movement? Will we actually have a civil war? Nope, because that won't serve the purposes of the Republican establishment. The Repoofs don't want to get into Al Sharpton's gunsights.

Besides, the white working-class voters have already been nicely distracted. American "exceptionalism" and stirring up war against Persia will keep their minds busy so they don't notice that Romney is identical to Obama, just another Goldman slave.

I'm always grumbling about the idiotic notion of "rights endowed by the Creator". If these "rights" somehow enter us at birth, then where are they? Are they in the heart? The ribcage? The femur? Are the "rights" favored by the left, such as abortion and pornography, located in the left arm? "Rights" favored by the right, such as guns and religion, in the right arm?

Even if you take the religious crap out of it, treat it as a description of basic characteristics of humanity, the remaining idea is still untenable and dangerous.

Untenable because our basic characteristics include lots of fine qualities: altruism, intelligence, strategizing, and so on; but our basic characteristics do not include a contract with any government. Governments are not part of Nature. They are organizations developed by groups of humans, and we can develop them any way we want. Some groups of humans prefer harsh and unyielding governments, others prefer looser types. Sometimes a group changes its mind and overthrows one form to get another.

The concept is dangerous because "rights" have turned out to be a wonderful tool for the black-robed Soviet mass-murderers. Any time they want to slaughter babies or bomb Christians, they just invent a "right" and nobody has the fucking guts to tell them NO!

What struck me just now: Most of the people who like to quote this "endowed by Creator" nonsense are also literalist Christians who reject any modification or addition to the Scriptures. They're the same people who say that Catholics and Mormons are "cults" because they add stuff to the Bible.

Okay then. This bizarre business about the Creator injecting capsules of "rights" into every baby is obviously an addition to Scripture, a statement about the intentions and actions of God which is not contained or implied in the Old or New Testaments.

How come this addition is OK but the Catholic and Mormon additions aren't?

Think, Christians. Do you really want to be adding something to scripture? Especially when the addition grants Harry Blackmun a tool to make baby-murder "legal"? Is this really what you want?

I don't have any problem with the idea of a Christian nation. If you want to have a Christian nation, by all means practice it. Kick the Muslims, Jews and atheists out, or at least require those groups to stay quiet. FACT: One-religion nations work, and multi-religion nations have decisively and finally failed. But please, don't do it halfway. Don't claim to have special permission from God, then allow satanic black-robed Soviets to misuse your special permission against you. Take charge or admit abject defeat. Pick one.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.